How to Cook a Moose (16 page)

Spite & Malice Pizza

On a cool late-summer evening in the farmhouse, after playing Spite & Malice all afternoon with two worn, soft decks of cards we found in the summer barn, we poured ourselves some red wine, added an ice cube to each glass, and then made pizzas for supper with amiable cooperation, between deadly rounds of cards. The oven heated up the house, but we opened all the windows and let the cross-breezes cool it again. When the pizza was hot and bubbling and starting to brown on top, we pulled it out and sliced it and ate it with more hot red pepper flakes and grated Parmesan, with a crisp green salad alongside. Then we resumed our cutthroat
card playing. (We both had a touch of indigestion in the night, but somehow I don't think it was from the pizza.)

2 pizza crusts (we used premade gluten-free crusts; you can use any you like)

2 cups shredded fresh buffalo mozzarella

For the sauce:

1 1/2 cups Pomi strained tomatoes

1 T olive oil

3 T minced or 1 T dried fresh basil, oregano, and/or tarragon

salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes to taste

For the roasted vegetables:

1 bell pepper, cored and thinly sliced

1 red pepper, cored and thinly sliced

1 large red onion, halved and thinly sliced

1 cup sliced mushrooms

8 to 12 medium cloves of garlic, peeled

2 T olive oil

For the meatballs:

1 cup ground turkey (or chicken, beef, veal, lamb, or pork)

1 small white onion, minced

1 T minced garlic

1/2 tsp cumin

1 egg

2 T ketchup

1/4 cup heavy cream

1/2 cup bread crumbs

salt, pepper, and hot red pepper flakes to taste

oil for frying

Optional additions to the meatballs:

1 to 2 minced jalapeno or Serrano peppers, depending on your taste for spiciness

3 T grated Parmesan

3 T toasted pine nuts

Preheat the oven to 475 degrees.

Mix the strained tomatoes in a small bowl with the fresh herbs, salt and pepper, and olive oil.

In a larger bowl, mix the cut-up vegetables and the olive oil. Spread on a cookie sheet in a single layer and bake for 20 minutes, or until soft and beginning to caramelize.

Combine all meatball ingredients. Stir lightly till mixed. With oiled hands to prevent sticking, form the mixture into small, gumball-size meatballs. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil. Drop the meatballs into the hot pan and fry them in batches, flipping them after a minute or two when browned and transferring the cooked ones to a plate.

To assemble the pizzas, spread half the tomato sauce on each crust, then the mozzarella, divided, followed by the roasted vegetables and then the meatballs. Bake on a pizza stone or large cookie sheet for 30 minutes, or until hot and bubbling.

And then before we knew it, it was autumn again, that time of smoky nostalgia and lucid reckoning as well as new beginnings and optimism. In a way, the weeks following Labor Day are the best time to be a resident of Maine. After Labor Day, the summer people and tourists depart Vacationland, leaving it once again to the natives and “year-rounders,” as the natives call us people from away who live here
full-time, as a kind of grudging upgrade. September is glorious: golden days, nights with a chill in the air. Indian summer in October brings everyone outside again for a few days, a week, for one last hurrah.

And after the summer-long verboten banishment, you can walk your dog off-leash on the beaches any time of day again. No massive white cruise ships hulk in the harbor, dwarfing every building in town, disgorging thousands of passengers who throng the Old Port. Street traffic trickles to its normal state of easy passage. Post–Labor Day, it's an empty, heavenly country up here, suddenly private and quiet, as the year-round residents hunker down and head into the magical autumn.

In late October and early November, of course, the leaf peepers show up. And all winter come the skiers. The economy depends on them, so it's a good thing, but during that sweet, empty time from early September until mid-October, it feels as if the world has gone away from this northeastern corner, and those of us who are left up here feast on roast squash and watch our dogs run on empty beaches, barking at seagulls.

Chapter Five

Mock Turtle Soup and Terroir

During the kitchen renovation, when eating out became a necessity rather than a luxury, we were very glad that Portland has more good restaurants per capita than any other American city.

We had struck gold. For passionate eaters, this town turned out to be something of a Shangri-la, and most of our favorite places happened to be within blocks of our house: the funky, tin-ceilinged brick-oven pizza place on the corner; the Japanese noodle place with luscious sushi rolls drizzled with house-made mayo and toasted almonds, or a bowl of silky, spicy rice noodles with julienned vegetables and a fresh egg from the chef's own chickens; not one, but two homey, stylish, slouchy, glam hipster bars offering healthy home-cooked-style food; the New Orleans joint with the killer chicken wings and the so-so (you get what you pay for) dollar oysters at Happy Hour, classic Louisiana grub, and a tray of different sauces and pickled peppers on every table; an Italian-French place with cozy booths and an excellent wine list and a seasonally changing menu of Mediterranean-inspired dishes; a Thai “street vendor–inspired” tapas-and-skewer bar whose night-menu (as opposed to day-menu) pad thai was the best in town; and
finally, our favorite, a classic corner bistro with perfect steak frites, perfect steak tartare, perfect simple salads, perfect pot de crème, and perfect service, decor, and everything else.

All this, within four blocks! There were other, equally excellent restaurants, five or seven or ten or twelve blocks away, like the dumpling place, the other pizza place, the upscale oyster place, and the hipster tapas place, but with such bounty, who needed to walk so far? Even during the two decades I lived in New York, no matter what neighborhood I was in, I never had this variety and quality of culinary excitement so close by.

A large part of my pleasure in all of these places was the fact that every one of them had a gluten-free menu and a friendly, concerned, helpful wait staff. Waiters in New York had always generally acted as if they had something much better to be doing, somewhere much better to be, and one or two of them even affected ignorance of the very existence of gluten, staring blankly at me as if I were speaking a foreign language they didn't comprehend. It was maddening, even though I understood: I'd once been one of those who scorned people with special dietary needs. I was a pain in the ass; I knew that. But it still bothered me.

A couple of years after I'd moved to the White Mountains, I went back to my old city on a book tour. As soon as I arrived, I made a beeline for my favorite bistro, a famous place in Soho beloved by natives and tourists alike. I ordered steak tartare without the bread; I thought I'd made my gluten situation very clear to the waiter.

However, when my lunch arrived, two slices of bread were perched on top of the chopped raw meat. I couldn't just whisk them off; my symptoms, damn it, can be triggered by a stray crumb.

“Oh, sorry,” the waiter said with a bored moue when I finally got his attention and pointed this out. He took it back to the kitchen.

Another plate reappeared. I slid my fork into the savory raw meat and took a bite. In the luscious mix of fresh raw hamburger combined with raw egg yolk and condiments and minced aromatics, I tasted something suspiciously breadlike; then I saw the bread crumbs all over my food. The waiter had gone to the back, expediently whisked the bread off the steak tartare, and served the plate back to me.

Listen. I am an eater without tender scruples. I will happily eat raw meat, raw egg yolk, raw anything, any part of any animal, and I've never been sick from any of it, but gluten turns me almost immediately into a human lump of depressed, bloated, foggy-brained wreckage. I won't die from it, but I can't tolerate it. That's that.

Well, I'd already eaten the gluten, so it didn't matter, because any amount will do the trick, so I ate the rest of it, but my joy—in being back in my old favorite restaurant, in my once-beloved New York, in this much-yearned-for perfect steak tartare—was vastly dimmed.

That was, I think, the moment when the scales fell from my eyes, and I saw the cynicism and weariness of the city too clearly to ever turn back.

I felt as if I'd discovered a whole new culinary world up here. In Portland, I wasn't a demanding, persnickety, irritating freak; I was among friends. Every restaurant had a gluten-free menu, even the sports bar in the Old Port, and the waiters were all willing to consult with the chef if they weren't sure about something. Not only could I eat out with confidence and fearlessness in my new town, but we quickly came to realize that, as a matter of course, most of the restaurants in town used as much organic, local, free-range, cage-free, hormone- and antibiotic-free, wild-caught, sustainable, seasonal ingredients as possible. The menus often included lists of local farms and sources of meats and seafood along with brief descriptions of provenance; this wasn't trumpeted smugly, it was mentioned as a matter of interest, as if to say, “Here's where your food came from. Bon appétit!”

Restaurants here don't need to trumpet anything, smugly or otherwise. Maine's restaurants are great in large part because the food grown and raised and caught here is great, and smart chefs know not to gussy it up too much or tamper with its essential perfection. The word
terroir
is bandied about quite a bit these days by food writers and cooks, to refer to the essential taste of a place, the particularity of a region's geography, climate, soil, seawater, and air, and the way these elements combine with plant genetics to produce a particular, local flavor, which informs an organic and essential cuisine. In this place of long harsh winters and short lush summers, spring mud and autumn leaves turning to mulch, granite and sea and forests and acid soil, and abundant precipitation, the terroir is so rich and consistently excellent, it's practical common sense to cook ingredients that are local and in season, the fresher and closer to home, the better.

Eating in a good Maine restaurant is—in its most sublime sense—like being in someone's house, at their table, if that someone happens to be an amazing chef with access to the best imaginable ingredients. Maine's back-to-the-land movement was in full swing in the 1970s. Many new organic farms were created and established, which gave rise to plenty of available year-round organic local produce, which, in turn, over time, gave rise to the indigenous excellence of the restaurants here. Maine chefs tend to design menus according to the best available ingredients at hand, letting them dictate a dish with visceral instinct rather than combining foods from wildly disparate locales and cuisines with cerebral abstraction and culinary school doctrine. This smart practicality and inventive simplicity makes the food here as exciting as the cuisines of other regions with a similar approach to cooking, like California, Italy, or France.